"Well?" Tess said.
"He does not sound like he believes it," Rowan said.
"He sounds like a man reading the weather."
"He sounds tired." Rowan closed the laptop, gently, as if the man inside it might be sleeping. "Everyone keeps asking me if I am going to answer him. That is my answer, I suppose. He is tired, and on Saturday he still has to grapple. So do I. The rest is posters."
Tess studied her friend through the small bright screen. At thirty, Tess Gallagher had known Rowan through school, through the first awkward year at Saltline when Rowan had tied her white belt wrong in three different ways in a single evening, through the clinic application, through Ilya Sorin's long silences and longer lessons. She knew the difference between Rowan being calm and Rowan hiding, and she reported her finding with satisfaction.
"You are not hiding," she said. "You are actually calm. That is unnerving. Do you want me to be nervous on your behalf? I have a whole speech prepared."
"Be nervous on Thursday," Rowan said. "Thursday is free. Tomorrow I have Harold at nine, and if you are nervous near Harold he will try to fix it, and he needs his breath for walking."
"How far this week?" Tess asked, and her voice softened, because everyone at the clinic had quietly become invested in a distance measured not in metres but in floor tiles.
"The hall," Rowan said. "If the morning is kind. The whole hall, with the cane, and a chair at the far end that he is pretending not to aim for."
"He has been aiming for that chair since September."
"Then September can have its day tomorrow," Rowan said, and Tess laughed, and the interview, the poster, and Kieran Holt's tired smile receded to their proper size, which was smaller than a seventy two year old man, a cane, and the length of a clinic hall on a kind morning.
The clinic hall at Saltline was not grand. It ran along the north side of the building, past the treatment rooms and the small kitchen where someone always left tea to go cold, and it had a handrail on one wall, scuffed paint at wheelchair height, and a row of tall windows that looked out over the harbour road. On a clear morning the light came in in long rectangles and lay across the floor tiles, and the patients who used the hall for their walking practice liked to say they were walking through weather. Harold Benson liked to say he was walking through other people's optimism, which was harder to cross.
He arrived on Tuesday at nine exactly, because Harold had been arriving exactly on time for appointments since before Rowan was born and regarded lateness as a character flaw in everyone, including ambulances. He wore a pressed shirt under a cardigan, his good shoes with the reinforced soles, and an expression of elaborate indifference that fooled nobody, least of all Rowan, who had set the chair at the far end of the hall without comment and placed his cane in his hand the way you hand a fencer a familiar blade.
"That chair," Harold said, "has moved."
"Chairs do that here," Rowan said. "It is a restless chair. Ignore it."
"I have been ignoring that chair since September, young woman, and it has followed me the whole length of this building."
"Then perhaps today it stops following," she said, "and you arrive instead."
His programme was written on a card in her pocket, though she no longer needed to read it. Warm the joints. Sit to stand, three times, hands only if needed. Weight shifts at the rail. Then the walk itself, in sections, with rests that were scheduled and therefore not defeats. That distinction, scheduled and therefore not a defeat, was something Rowan had learned from Ilya Sorin long before she ever worked in a clinic, and she had built Harold's whole stubborn recovery on it. A rest you had planned was a tool. A rest that ambushed you was a story you told yourself later, badly, at 3 a.m.
He did the sit to stands with grim ceremony. He did the weight shifts while criticising the harbour forecast, the council, and a seagull of his acquaintance. Then he stood at the start line, which was not a line at all but a strip of blue tape Rowan had put down in his first week and never removed, and he looked down the hall the way he had once, in another life, looked down a pier in winter weather to judge whether the walk was worth it.